(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.Contact us for information about using this image.

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Orra White Hitchcock (1796-1863) was a talented artist. Her delicate and sophisticated drawings placed her among the finest early landscape artists of the Connecticut River Valley region. The gifted daughter of an Amherst, Massachusetts, farmer, Orra attended academies in South Hadley and Roxbury. She became an assistant instructor at Deerfield Academy, where she met Edward Hitchcock (1793-1864). They married in 1821 and raised eight children. Edward became a prominent geologist and president of Amherst College. Orra divided her time between caring for her children and illustrating her husband's works on geology. Her husband gratefully recalled that "Though pressed by the cares of a numerous family, rarely, if ever, during forty years, has she turned a deaf ear to my solicitations for drawings...How providential that such a wife should be given me!" This lithograph of Turners Falls was one of a series of illustrations depicting the geology and landscape of the Connecticut Valley.